Corinne Lee

Our guest this week is Corinne Lee. The educator, poet, fiction writer, essayist and Master Naturalist will talk with us about her book of poetry, Plenty(Penguin, 2016).

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Corinne Lee teaches art, literature, creative writing and music. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in dozens of literary magazines. Her most recent book of poetry, Plenty was published last year by Penguin.

Corinne was chosen by the Poetry Society of America as one of the top ten emerging poets in America. Six of her poems have been included in Best American Poetry.

Her debut collection, PYX (Penguin, 2005), was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series competition.

Using Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a springboard, Corinne Lee’s second book of poetry is an eco-epic that investigates and embodies the deterioration of America’s environment due to industrial agriculture, fossil fuels, war, racism, and technology. Lee’s book-length work draws upon a variety of poetic forms and histories—especially events in 1892, which included a surge in lynching in America and the beginning of our coup d’état of Hawaii—to examine how modern technology facilitated the Holocaust, sustains America’s racist prison industrial complex, fuels climate change, and ultimately underlies what has been called the Sixth Extinction. A daring and dazzling narrative of great originality, Plenty advocates a feminist ecobuddhist perspective: only by dismantling false hierarchies, especially those of patriarchal capitalism, are we able to recognize that all agents of environmental collapse are one with us. –Penguin Poets

Praise for Plenty

“Plenty arises with litany and ire to meet the degradation of the Anthropocene, toxic hand of man everywhere complicit in planetary woes. Lee’s epic magnanimously explores the frightening heights and unfathomable depths of crisis through a vibrant, cosmic naming and calling out. This is a compelling, bold, and studious documentary poetics.” –Anne Waldman

“Stylistically radiant and diverse, Plenty is an epic for our time: shattered with horrors and difficult truths, blazing with warnings and, perhaps even redemptively, with the assertion of the capacities of poetry to enlighten and sing.” –Dean Young

“Our bizarre historical moment sprawls here into a Roundup Ready, gun-toting, womb envying, American insistence on song. A wild and fevered epic devoted to saving the plenty of the lyric voice from annihilation.” –Alison Hawthorne Deming

“Here we have (as Whitman did) Emerson’s idea of entranced waiting (solitary, grand, secular) but from a place/time/mind so full, so high in flames it seems miraculous that anyone could be so relentlessly awake and singing there (here). . .the volume is high, the tone necessarily and at once keening, meditative, accusing, aroused.” –Kathleen Peirce